We have a club class for the 1990s Scalextric F1s with 'brown bar' magnets, which is coming up in the next quarter. I picked up a couple of bargains to tuck away until they're needed, but touched up the finish before doing so...

First up a Benetton B193, this one is apparently from a set and is in the number 6 livery of Riccardo Patrese. I think most people find Scaley's Benetton one of the faster cars of this era, and I always preferred the yellow and green livery to the mulch of green and blue that followed. Add one sort-of-Patrese helmet and she's done...

Secondly a real favourite of mine, the Ferrari 643. It followed the gorgeous John Barnard-designed 639, 640 and 641/2. Introduced halfway through the 1991 season, when the low nose of the earlier cars was proving uncompetitive against the new generation of 'high nose' cars, drawing inspiration from Harvey Postlethwaite's Tyrrell 019.

Ferrari sort of bodged it with the 643. The nose was slightly raised, which in turn upset the rest of the car and never really delivered results. In fact by the end of the year, team leader Alain Prost compared the 643 unfavourably with a truck and was sacked for his temerity.

I was never a Prost fan. From watching him in action at the 1989 Birmingham Superprix with Eddie Jordan's F3000 team, I knew that Jean Alesi was the man for me: spectacular, sideways and ludicrously brave. His F1 debut for Tyrrell the same season netted fourth place and then, starting his first full F1 season in 1990, came THAT dice with Ayrton Senna's McLaren in Phoenix...

As a result of that battle, Alesi could pretty much write his own cheque for 1991 and signed a contract with Williams. Soon after, however, he broke that contract to sign for Ferrari - based purely on his love for the red cars and his French-Italian roots. In terms of his career, missing out on the all-conquering Williams-Renault FW14 was probably the biggest error of judgemenbt ever made by a driver. But for me it made him a hero, choosing to wrestle with awful cars and display car control unlike anything else I've seen before or since.

Here's an onboard of Alesi in the 643 at Spa...

Scalextric's model isn't all that bad, and with a set of wheels from the recent Senna/Mansell cars would doubtless be even better. Given that our club cars have to remain standard I just added no. 28 decals drawn from Patto's 1987 and 1994 sets, added 'Marlboro' name badges and painted the helmet. Which is of course the single biggest problem with the model, being about 20% out of scale! Nevertheless, I'm happy with my 'hero car'!